Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2014

The language policy of the French Revolution is known today especially for the imposition of the national language and the oppression of dialects and regional languages in France. This pilot study focuses on a less-known phenomenon of that period: translation policy. From 1790 on, several decrees stipulated the translation of national laws and decrees into the regional languages of France and some languages of other European countries. We will illustrate this translation policy focusing on translations of political and administrative texts from French into Flemish in Belgium (which was annexed by the French Republic in 1795 and remained French until the end of the Napoleonic era). We will not only try to shed some light on the conditions under which the translations published in Belgium were produced, but also analyze some typical examples drawn from different genres.

This study investigates how poetry translators tackle source regional voice within their wider approach to poetic text. It analyses eleven translators’ ‘outputs’ of Scots and English translations from Giuseppe Belli’s 19th-century regional-language sonnets, which are set in working-class Rome. Each output was coded for voice (space, community, tenor marking), text-world space, and poetic form (rhyme, rhythm), then analysed quantitatively and qualitatively; translator interviews and translators’ written commentaries provided extra data. Translators ranged along a spectrum (apparently genre-specific) between two extremes: (1) ‘relocalising’ voice into target regional language/dialect with similar working-class and informal features to Belli’s originals, whilst relocalising place and person names to target-country analogies, and recreating rhyme and rhythm; (2) translating into standard (supra-regional, literary/educated, neutral-to-formal) English, whilst preserving Belli’s Roman setting, but replacing rhyme and rhythm by free verse. This reflects a spectrum between two priorities: (1) creatively conveying poetic texture; (2) replicating surface semantics.

In a seminal contribution published in Target in 1998, Daniel Simeoni argued for a habitus-governed model of explanation for translation and suggested that subservience might be a defining feature of this habitus, a primordial norm. The objective of the present article is twofold. First, it aims to recontextualize the ‘subservience hypothesis’ by shedding light on the empirical work underlining it. Second, following the approach developed in Simeoni (2001), the author tests again the hypothesis through textual analysis, by studying the early translation history into French of a textbook entitled Marketing Management by Philip Kotler. The author explores to what extent traces of the primordial norm, as defined by Simeoni (2001), can be found in the first four French editions of this scholarly text produced over the period (1967–1981), two of which were signed by a professional translator and the others by a marketing scholar.

The purpose of this study was to find a method to measure difficulty in a translation task. Readability formulas have been suggested to be a useful tool and yet this needs to be empirically tested. In this study, NASA Task Load Index, a multidimensional scale for measuring mental workload, was used to assess the level of translation difficulty for the translator. It was found that a text’s readability only partially accounts for its translation difficulty level. Translation quality score was found to be an unreliable indicator of translation difficulty level, while time-on-task was significantly, but weakly, related to translation difficulty level. A formula was developed to predict a text’s translation difficulty level for a translator by using the translator’s pre-translation rating.

Scholars in Descriptive Translation Studies and other areas of translation theory have often employed ‘style’ as a term, but have rarely expanded their stylistic reflections beyond the level of impressionistic description. In the last decade, however, a small number of articles and monographs have advocated or attempted a fusion of stylistics and translation studies, into something that Kirsten Malmkjær (2004) has aptly termed “translational stylistics.” Building on this handful of contributions, the author proposes a bi-textual analysis of deictic shifts in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Giulia Celenza’s early Italian translation Gita al faro (1934).